One of the most senior members of the Turkish government sparked an outcry on Tuesday, after declaring that women should not laugh loudly in public.
The deputy prime minister, Bülent Arinc, one of the co-founders of the ruling Islamic-rooted Justice and Development party (AKP), made the comment while lamenting the moral decline of modern society.
“A man should be moral but women should be moral as well, they should know what is decent and what is not decent,” Arinc said in a speech on Monday, in the western Bursa region for the Bayram holiday that marks the end of Ramadan.
“She should not laugh loudly in front of all the world and should preserve her decency at all times,” he added.
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s ruling AKP is accused by critics of seeking to erode Turkey’s strict separation of religion and state – the basis of the secular republic founded by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.
Arinc went on to denounce a moral degradation that left society awash with drugs and prostitution, and lashed out at popular Turkish soap operas for encouraging lax lifestyles, in comments quoted throughout the Turkish media and online.
He denounced the excessive use of cars, saying that if even the “river Nile was filled with petrol”, there wouldn’t be enough to go around. Arinc also slammed the excessive use of mobile phones in Turkish society, with women “spending hours on the phone to swap recipes”.
Imitating a Turkish woman on her mobile, he said: “‘Is there nothing else going on? What happened to Ayse’s daughter? When’s the wedding?’ People should say these things face to face.”
His comments provoked a storm on social media, with political tensions riding high as Erdoğan prepares to stand in presidential elections on 10 August.
Erdoğan’s main rival in the polls, the mild-mannered former head of the Organisation of Islamic Co-operation, Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu, took to Twitter to poke fun at Arinc. “We need to hear the happy laughter of women,” he wrote.
Anti-Erdogan bloggers responded with even greater anger. One Twitter user, bturkmen, said: “Stop giving us moral lessons and instead count all the money that you have stolen,” referring to corruption allegations against Erdoğan and his circle, which surfaced last year.
A pious Muslim who does not drink and whose wife wears a hijab, Erdoğan has always denied any desire to erode Turkey’s secular principles.
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Source: The Guardian